The National Nuclear Security Administration did not consider certain cost and radioactive waste analyses when it decided to make plutonium pits in New Mexico and South Carolina, the agency said in a court filing this week.
It is the latest turn in a two-year-old lawsuit filed in the federal district court for South Carolina in Aiken by plaintiffs Savannah River Site Watch, The Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plans to produce at least 80 pits per year sometime after 2030 by re-purposing the Mixed-Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River near Aiken, S.C., to produce at least 50 pits annually and the Los Alamos National Laboratory to produce at least 30 annually.
The environmental groups sued the agency over the plan, arguing that the decision should have triggered a broad environmental review that NNSA says is unnecessary and that the agency did not turn over to the court a complete record of the documents that informed the government’s decision making.
In an Oct. 10 filing with U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, the NNSA said that was not so and asked the court to dismiss the plaintiffs’ motion to force an additional 42 documents into the administrative record for the pit decision.
In the process, however, the NNSA acknowledged that it approved the two-site strategy without or consulting a 2018 engineering assessment of pit production at Los Alamos or a transuranic waste inventory from 2020 that examined the effect of the pit mission on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the only permanent disposal facility for the transuranic waste pit production will create. The transuranic waste inventory is dated November 2020, the same month and year NNSA made its formal decision on the two-state pit plan.
In July, the plaintiffs notified the NNSA of 42 documents they claimed should have been included in court documents. NNSA reviewed each of those documents and found that nine of them were already in the record, six were inadvertently omitted that should be a part of the record, and the “remaining documents were not directly or indirectly considered by the agency when it decided to produce plutonium pits at both Savannah River and Los Alamos,” NNSA said in its response filed with the federal trial court in South Carolina on Oct. 10.
